HardwareMotherboardsSponge made from a cheesy waste product can help recover the gold from your dumped circuit boardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

HardwareMotherboardsSponge made from a cheesy waste product can help recover the gold from your dumped circuit boardsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Seraficus via Getty Images)

A stock photo of the making of pecorino cheese, with the whey and curds clearly visible

Extracting these from old boards isn’t easy, though, which is why there’s this kind of research going on.

Normally, to get hold of the rare metals, the e-waste is put into a large acid bath, which dissolves the materials into a solution. Floating around in that liquid are gold ions but how to get hold of them? Enter stage left, whey.

What they did was take the whey proteins and use them to form fibrillar amyloids; think of these as being groups of proteins in long, thin tendrils. They knit together and once dried, take the form of a sponge, which is then placed into the acid solution containing the gold ions. Once it’s absorbed as much as it can, the sponge is removed and then heated, to make a gold nugget.

(Image credit: Advanced Materials, First published: 23 January 2024, DOI: (10.1002/adma.202310642))

Schematic route followed to generate neat value via pure gold, extracted from food waste (whey) and e-waste as starting source materials.

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The ETH Zurich report says that 20 motherboards were used to test the method and together they yielded a total of 450 milligrams of gold, worth around $30/£25, depending on the market. It’s not 100% pure gold, as the sponge does absorb other metals, but they were in sufficiently small quantities to rate the nugget at 22 carats.

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And best of all, this method isn’t just a laboratory exercise: It’s genuinely cost-effective according to the researchers, as the combined cost of the materials and energy required is 50 times less than the value of gold recovered. That means it has a far greater chance of being properly commercialised and scaled to the size required to tackle thevast amount of e-waste generated each year.

Cheese: Is there nothing it can’t do?

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